Question

Companies Say Trump Is Hurting Business by Limiting Legal Immigration。dissicion this topic

Answer 1

The Trump administration is using the country’s vast and nearly opaque immigration bureaucracy to constrict the flow of foreign workers into the United States by throwing up new roadblocks to limit legal arrivals.

The government is denying more work visas, asking applicants to provide additional information and delaying approvals more frequently than just a year earlier. Hospitals, hotels, technology companies and other businesses say they are now struggling to fill jobs with the foreign workers they need.

With foreign hires missing, the employees who remain are being forced to pick up the slack. Seasonal industries like hotels and landscaping are having to turn down customers or provide fewer services. Corporate executives worry about the long-term impact of losing talented engineers and programmers to countries like Canada that are laying out the welcome mat for skilled foreigners.

In April 2017, President Trump signed a “Buy American and Hire American” executive order, directing government officials to “rigorously enforce” immigration laws. The order did not get the kind of attention that followed the administration’s decision to separate families at the Mexican border this summer.

A few months later, the president endorsed legislation that would cut legal immigration by half. Some lawmakers say Mr. Trump is using administrative means to reshape immigration policy because those changes have stalled on Capitol Hill.

In practice, businesses say the increased red tape has made it harder to secure employment-based visas. That has added to the difficulty of finding qualified workers with the unemployment rate falling to 3.9 percent.

A recent analysis of government data by the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan research group, found that the denial rate for H-1B visa petitions for skilled foreign workers had increased 41 percent in the last three months of the 2017 fiscal year, compared with the third quarter. Government requests for additional information for applications doubled in the fourth quarter, a few months after Mr. Trump issued his order.

Experts say a sustained reduction in immigration could dampen growth over time as more baby boomers retire, leaving big gaps in the job market.

That goes for high-skilled immigrants and low-skilled workers, said Francine D. Blau, an economist at Cornell. The latter will be vital in fields like elder care and child care, as well as construction and cleaning.

The Business Roundtable, a group of corporate leaders, recently challenged the Trump administration over changes that it says threaten the livelihoods of thousands of skilled foreign workers, and economic growth and competitiveness.

The H-1B program, which was created to bring in foreigners with skills that business leaders argued would strengthen the economy, has long been a target for some politicians. The visa program has been criticized because corporations have exploited it to replace American workers.

Still, many economists say H-1B holders are valuable. Immigrants file patents at twice the rate of native-born Americans and start about 25 percent of high-tech companies in the United States.

Hospitals in particular argue that they need foreign doctors who are more willing than native-born Americans to take jobs in less glamorous and lower-paying fields, like internal and family medicine. Of Northwell’s 1,826 resident doctors, 165 came in under H1-B or J-1 student visas.

Nearly one-third of pathology residents come from other countries, according to the National Resident Matching Program. But the number of overseas applicants in all specialties has dropped for two years in a row.

Economists says "There’s absolutely no research that supports the idea that cutting legal immigration is good for the economy".